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WAN optimization appliance maker NetEx said today that it is getting ready to support Microsoft's Hyper-V server hypervisor as a deployment vehicle for its own HyperIP virtual appliance.

The forthcoming release of the HyperIP WAN optimization tool will not only run inside of Hyper-V, but it will be able to allow virtual machines running atop Hyper-V to be live migrated around the WAN and managed by Microsoft's Systems Center tools for Windows.

The current release of the HyperIP WAN optimization appliance, release 5.5, was announced by NetEx in April 2009, and was the first release of the tool to be ripped out of the x64-Linux server appliance created and sold by NetEx and deployed inside of virtual machines running atop ESX Server 3.X. (NetEx is a 1999 spinout of the old StorageTek disk business - long before Sun Microsystems ate it and Oracle started eating Sun).

HyperIP has subsequently been certified to run on VMware's latest ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor, and it hooks into vCenter Site Recovery Manager, for managing live migration failover of virtual machines, and vCenter Converter, which manages the conversion of physical servers to virtual machines on the fly. A whole slew of storage replication and management software is certified to run with HyperIP as well, which you can see a list of here.

According to Mike Ascher, director of channel sales at NetEx, NetEx is only supporting its future HyperIP release 6.1 tool inside of Hyper-V R2 virtual machines (forget the original Hyper-V), and significantly this is the version of Microsoft's hypervisor that supported the live migration of VMs from one physical server to another. This is a key feature that businesses want as they deploy server virtualization because it allows for disaster recovery and business continuity for many applications without resorting to high availability clustering.

Another thing they want is better performance over the WAN when they do live migrations. NetEx has run benchmarks that show using HyperIP can boost the performance of live migrations dependent on VMware's VMotion (for moving operating system and applications) and Storage VMotion (for teleporting their related files) by as much as 1000 per cent compared to using raw VMware software over the WAN.

Ascher says that HyperIP release 6.1 is running in the labs now and will likely go into beta testing in February or March. It is expected to be delivered in the second quarter of this year supporting Hyper-V.

Once support for Hyper-V is out the door both as a deployment container and as a WAN optimization target application, Ascher says NetEx will move on to adding support for the open source Xen hypervisor. No word yet on when that might be delivered.

HyperIP is priced based on the bandwidth that the WAN it manages has, ranging from $2,000 for 1.5 Mbit/sec to $75,000 for 800 Mbit/sec. You can gang up multiple HyperIP instances to increase bandwidth further. ®